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After the GHF December Blog Hop

When I returned from the GHF December Blog Hop I found Sprite in a much better mood.

While she was taking her nap the Memory Elephant and the Giraffe had put up the Christmas lights and garlands.
The Dabrowski Dogs had defeated the Black Dogs in the chess match and the only sign of the Black Dogs was the greeting card and apology note on the pinboard.

The Dabrowski dogs were also too busy with other things to pester Sprite.
Psycho Motor had gone outside to bounce. Intellectual had gone to the library to investigate the background of various holiday traditions. Sensual was having a Lavender Lathers pamper session at the Paws for Poise grooming parlour bus.
Emotional and Imaginational had gone to help with the Reading to Dogs program.
The Taste Tester dogs had sent a greeting card

The Twitter Bird carollers had begun rehearsing for their annual nativity play.
Oliver Moremouse and the other mice in the skirting boards were getting ready to celebrate.
Ginger Pony had been harnessed and was giving sleigh rides.

And the mystery of the vanished Christmas stockings/slippers had been solved. The Dabrowski Dogs had claimed them and hung them up hoping for some extra treats at Christmas time.

These are the blog posts I visited and the comments I left

Feeling Lighter ~ My Little Poppies (Cait Curley)http://my-little-poppies.com/2014/12/feeling-lighter/Everything is feeling lighter to me lately: parenting, homeschooling, even the holiday chaos. When I think back to this time last year, everything was just…well… heavier; life felt more challenging and stressful. What changed? In some respects, everything has changed.

My comment
I love your blog, Caitie! And so many of your descriptions bring back memories of our children at similar ages and our family life at those times!
Thank you for a beautifully written blog.
Wishing you all a very blessed and happy Christmas.

Gifted Children: Just Pulling the Wool Over Your Eyes ~ Raising Tall Poppies (Celi Trepanier)http://crushingtallpoppies.com/2014/12/15/gifted-children-just-pulling-the-wool-over-your-eyes/
With us sitting in the old, middle school desks and this teacher sitting in her chair facing us from in front of the class, she cocked back a bit with her arms folded across her chest and smugly announced with a truckload of retaliatory confidence and self-righteous pride, “oh, he is just pulling the wool over your eyes!”
My comment
Yes, I remember being told by a lady who had never met our children that one of them was ‘just saying/doing that to manipulate me’ and at first feeling bad because I thought she was right and then realizing that she was not right at all!
Thank you for a great blog, Celi!

You need a (holiday) food plan to tackle the candy canes and eggnog. The sheer volume of sugary stuff and food dyes/additives/flavorings is a nightmare for many 2e parents/kids, imho, which is magnified 10x or more during the holidays.
My comment
Thank you for a great list of suggestions for combating the problems associated with sugar and colouring laden holiday foods.
Have a delicious holiday season!

Major Themes Related to My Research on Gifted/2E Kids and Bullying ~ RedWhiteandGrew (Pamela Price)

http://redwhiteandgrew.com/2014/12/15/ghf-blog-hop-major-themes-related-to-my-research-on-gifted2e-kids-and-bullying/
Many children may, when stressed, feel their overexcitabilties “fire up” in response. This can impede the logical, systemic calming down required for someone to address bullying by herself and gain a lasting, powerful sense of self-efficacy in the face of conflict. We need, as parents and educators, to work to help kids manage these OEs before a negative personal encounter. In short, we owe it to them to help develop their social skills in preparation for a negative encounter to build their resilience. We parents may also need to scaffold better socially those children who have OEs that are “off the charts,” managing their exposure to stressful or toxic situations or people and refrain from gaslighting them at the holidays.

My comment
Thank you, Pamela. I am looking forward to the publication of your book!
As Paula says you are giving an in depth approach to a difficult and far reaching topic.

Some of the most overwhelming aspects of raising gifted children are all the quirks, idiosyncrasies and discrepancies in abilities. Without a thorough understanding of what overexcitabilities are and how they impact a child’s experience in the world, parents and others close to the child may contemplate attaching a pathological disorder to try and explain away the difficult behaviors and outbursts that unfold in daily life. To contemplate matters more, asynchronicity creates a layer of confusion when a child whose physical age, intellectual age and social-emotional age conflict with his chronological age concurrently and in any given moment. But, let’s not stop there kindred spirits. Until we sprinkle in a heavy dose of perfectionism, we haven’t even touched the surface of how complicated living with gifted children can be.
My comment
Great post, Amy! A really good clear discussion about the OEs, asynchronous development and perfectionism and how they affect the everyday lives of the gifted.

Parenting and OEs: Is Sensitivity Your Child’s Super Power? ~ Through a Stronger Lens (Nicole Linn)http://throughastrongerlens.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/ghf-blog-hop-parenting-and-oes-is.html
On a regular basis, the members of the family alternate between high levels of emotion, the need to move, and a desire to learn and do everything as often as possible. We each have various levels of sensory comfort and discomfort, and there is no shortage of imagination. It can make life interesting.
My comment
The Emotional OE is indeed a super power! Lesley Sword calls Emotional Intensity the Energy that Drives the Gifted Intellect and Dr Linda Silverman in her article Dabrowski’s Theory rates Emotional as “perhaps most important of the overexcitabilities
I really enjoyed reading this post – thank you Nicole!

Parenting Reality in the Land of Willful Ignorance ~ Homeschooling Hatters (Care Martin)http://homeschoolinghatters.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/parenting-reality-in-land-of-willful.html
Every so often we run into folks who just don’t get what life is like at our house. They have an image of what a “gifted child” is in their head, and when our life doesn’t match that image, obviously it is because none of us are gifted. I wish, fairly frequently, that our lives matched that image, but they just don’t. However, the fact that we aren’t all bookworms who enjoy studying, who raise their hands first, or who don’t have parties, but instead have Socratic Conversations over weekends, while engaged in high-profile careers which allow us to have a housekeeper, and incredibly flexible hours so we’re mostly paid to just think… Well, people seem to not realize that no, that’s not what gifted (much less 2E!) is. At least, not by and large
My comment
It can be really hard when onlookers just don’t understand asynchronous development and OEs!
Thank you for a great blog, Care!

What do you do when you’re excruciatingly sensitive, severely intense, outrageously curious, and wildly imaginative and you’re raising a kid who is JUST LIKE YOU? Do you– run away from home? Move to a state where marijuana is legal? Outsource your child to India? Create a reality TV show?
My comment
Love this post, Paula!
I did once write a series of posts about an imaginary reality show The Survivor – Gifted Island game -like a cross between Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race and the show about the camp for badly behaved teenagers.
It is played by teams of one parent, one teacher and one gifted or 2E kid.
You don’t get voted off the Island – you just have to stay there and survive and everybody gets to watch how you cope and laugh or cry about it.

This is a commentary post on the Gifted Homeschoolers Forum December Blog Hop: Parenting OEs, 2Es and everything in between.